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c. 1837 · the county's set-piece crime, in Centre Township
The county's one famous early crime was tested against this ground and found to belong to another township; the test and the placing both print. Chapman's "A Counterfeiting Reminiscence" tells of old James Odle, who about 1837 kept a cakes-and-beer sign south of South Bend in Centre township, and of the well-dressed men seen hanging around his humble premises until a neighbor's suspicions reached the authorities. Odle, his son-in-law Foskit, and Van Amburgh, Cumnius, Dixon, Clark and others were arrested and confined in the old log jail; the search of Odle's premises found the dies and press for making bogus dollars, copper, base coin ready for the dies — and fifteen pounds of arsenic, with which, Odle explained to the grand jury after turning State's evidence, the copper was whitened. The prisoners, remanded for trial, "boasted that they would not stay there any longer than it suited them, and made their escape in broad daylight"; all got away but the feeble Van Amburgh, who was never tried "on account of some informality in the indictment." The arsenic's afterlife — sold in part to a druggist, stored in the court-house garret, scattered years later by boys who took it for chalk, and finally gathered and buried after two little girls ate of it and were saved "with proper attention" — is the county's strangest crime story entire. It is printed here at pointer strength for one reason: so that no future pass mistakes it for this town's. It happened in Centre Township, to men of no connection with this ground that any record states, and New Carlisle's claim on it is exactly none.
Sources
- Chapman (1880), "A Counterfeiting Reminiscence," pp. 536–537, read first-hand (locality stated in the text: Centre township).